Page 8 of Silver Slayer

I tested the weight of the bracelet on my wrist. Strange, but not unwelcome. An advantage was an advantage.

"Stay low, stay quiet, stay alive," Ruze added. "If they're hostile, don't engage. Recon only, then get back here with information."

"And if they're friendly?" Truxxet asked.

"Use your judgment," Tyrk said. "But trust nothing on this world until proven otherwise."

I checked my blade, secured it in its sheath at my hip, and slipped a smaller knife into my boot. The familiar weight of weapons settled against my body and pushed back the last of the dizziness from my head wound.

"Ready?" I turned to Truxxet.

He nodded and pressed the node. In an instant, he vanished before my eyes, leaving nothing but empty space where he'd stood. I reached out instinctively, and my fingers connected with his solid form.

"Can you truly not see me?" came his disembodied voice, tinged with wonder.

"No," I breathed. "You're gone."

He laughed softly. "Activate yours."

I pressed the node and felt a strange tingle move across my scales. Truxxet reappeared not solid, but a shimmering impression, his outline wavering like a mirage.

"We stay together," I said, keeping my voice low. "Unknown terrain, unknown threats."

Truxxet's outline rippled as he nodded. "Two warriors, one shadow."

Tyrk held out two short-range comms, eyes scanning the empty space where we stood. Our invisible hands took them.

Behind us, Brunnex sat slumped at the console where Ruze had positioned him. "May the Spirits guide you," he murmured, voice thin but earnest.

We moved toward the ragged tear in the hull where the viewport had been, avoiding the main hatch. The torn opening offered silence, stealth, and surprise. Everything we needed.

Truxxet's shimmering outline followed me through into the alien world. We paused just outside, shoulders close, taking in our surroundings. The sweet, ferrous scent of the planet hit me full in the face, almost overwhelming after the ship's filtered air. My boots sank into the soft soil. I glanced at the impressions we'd already left, then back at Truxxet.

"We circle behind the ship," I murmured, pointing to our footprints stamped in the earth. "Climb the ridge. Come at them from behind."

His outline flickered as he nodded.

The vegetation around us pulsed with unsettling life, leaves shifting as if tracking our passage, not unlike the floratrap fields of Valose, those vast and deceptively still carnivorous plants that could take a warrior's life before he ever saw them move.

My scales flared and cycled uselessly through silvers and blues utterly inadequate against the riot of hues this world threw at us from every direction. On Valose, our camouflage had been refined over generations to match our world's palette of silver, white, and deep blue. Here, I could barely process all the colors my eyes were reporting.

"The colors are so bright," I murmured to Truxxet, blinking against the assault, “to look at them burns my eyes.”

His own scales flickered in the same distress. “Like staring too long at the twin suns,” he whispered back.

I blinked rapidly, trying to clear the afterimages that flared each time a particularly vivid flower or crystalline formation caught the light. My arm flickered silver and blue and back again, my scales searching for a pattern that didn't exist here.

We gave the four figures a wide berth as we curved toward the ridge. The ascent was gentle, each step placed carefully among the strange flora. Twice we froze. Vine-like growths reached blindly toward us despite our cloaks, as though they could sense the heat of living bodies moving through them.

Once we crested the ridge, I dropped into a crouch. Truxxet's shimmering outline settled beside me. Beyond us, four figures picked their way through the dense vegetation. Three moved in tight formation behind a fourth who led with confident, unhurried precision. As we watched, they stopped, huddling together while one consulted some kind of device.

We needed to get closer.

I tapped Truxxet's arm and gestured a wide arc through the treeline, signaling we would loop far around and come up behind them. We moved in silence through the dense vegetation, picking our way between crystalline formations that jutted from the soil at irregular intervals, some no taller than my knee, others rising to my shoulder, refracting the alien light into fractured, nameless color across our cloaked forms.

As we curved in behind them, whispers drifted through the still suns-rise air, female voices speaking a language that brushed against the edges of my memory.

I reached up instinctively to touch the small device nestled behind my ear. The translator. I'd grown so accustomed to its presence that I almost forgot it was there. A constant, quiet reminder of my abduction, waking with it already attached on the Gorken ship.